One of Life’s great annoyances in this advanced electronic age is the auto-correct spelling feature present in our phones. It never seems to get certain things correct, automatically or otherwise. For example, when I type way I get easy and when I type easy I get ready. When I type as, I get add, which is at least close, but when I type better I get beget. That’s kind of close letter-wise, but no one since Moses has used the word beget so I don’t know why the phone automatically includes it as a choice.

The phone seems to have problems with B words in general. When I type, “I am going to breakfast,” the phone spits out “I am going to Bhagat.” Bhagat for those of you who don’t know, and that’s all of us, derives from a Sanskrit word meaning devotee. Again, why is that even a choice? I mean, is the phone thinking, “This guy can’t be talking about bacon and eggs, so let’s automatically assume that he’s making reference to a practitioner of Hindu.”

Often, when I type a, as in, I am going to a public place, I get s or z. What makes the phone think that? There’s only one other single-letter word in the entire English language, so if I hit only one button the phone should give me a or I, not s or z. Someone at Acme Auto Correct should have noticed that an s appeared when he typed a and yelled, “Hey, we need to adjust our programming. Get me the vice-president in charge of vowels!”

Sometimes the phone cops an attitude with me. I might type Chihuahua and it will put down circus, so now the person to whom I am texting thinks that there’s a lost circus in our neighborhood. When I go back and carefully type each letter of Chihuahua correctly, it still puts down circus. Then I realize that I haven’t hit the little check box to tell the phone that yes, this is really the word I meant. It stares at me in a condescendingly blank way and I know it’s thinking that I don’t know what I’m talking about until reluctantly, it spits out Chihuahua. It’s not a Smart Phone, it’s a Smarmy Phone.

Once I texted the phrase final shot, but the phone got all sophomoric on me and changed the vowel in shot. You would think it would auto-correct that, but no, the phone just giggled instead.

Let’s face it, our phones only half listen to us, anyway. I just randomly ran my fingers over the text keyboard and out came Both she only age Muncie. I wasn’t even typing any words, but it repeated what it thought I said. It must have been watching a ballgame on its little internal screen and was only half-listening.

Now, granted, I could hit the microphone icon and speak into the texting app, which would then translate my words into print and send them along, but this I refuse to do on principle. That’s just a phone conversation with a middle man. Many of you remember those decidedly immobile, five pound, rotary-faced, telephones that didn’t do much except connect you directly to another person. Looking back, I’m grateful for one thing in particular that those old phones didn’t do: Raise my blood pressure.

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About Austin Gisriel

You know the guy that records a baseball game from the West Coast in July and doesn't watch it until January just to see baseball in the winter? That's me. I'm a writer always in search of a good story, baseball or otherwise.

Thank goodness I still have my “flip phone” which makes calls, takes calls, and not much more than that, for which I am grateful! When my phone dies, (and I hope no time soon) I don’t claim to be smart, so a “smart phone” will be of no use to me. With that said, Happy Thanksgiving to you & all of your readers.

I guess that’s why I don’t own a smart phone. And by the way … the voice reception to the person on the other end is not as good as an old-fashioned hard-wired telephone. Both of our kids have smart phones, and we suffer through conversations with them because their audio pickup of the voice is very directionally sensitive. If the person speaking moves their mouth away from the microphone (or whatever receives the voice) just a tiny bit, the consonants start becoming unidentifiable. It’s hard to tell “hell” from “bell”. These smart phones are NOT a good replacement for the telephone, audio-wise …. just my opinion … sick of them!

This was a hilarious read, Austin. I, too, wonder about these supposed smart phones. I will say that I do enjoy being able to get directions on the fly, and other great things I can do with mine, so I guess I will take the good with the bad. 😉

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